Another update and another toilet.
July 14th 2011. The 100 Club. Oxford Street.
London.
I note the above was scrawled on the wall adjacent as I took
a leak. It made me smile. On and off, I have lived in Converse for over half my
life. I like them so much, I have been known to sleep in them but remain
otherwise naked. Used to be good? Nah.
They still are!
To understand why I was standing in the Gents at the 100
Club, I need to step back a few years. To a summer day in 2008.
In my last post, I spoke of the cyclical music loops at
Topshop that the staff became conditioned to ignore.
I recall a day when I strolled across the shop floor toward
some dull but vital meeting with a department manager. As I noted last time,
you only really took in the music when it warmed your heart and cockles or spat
in the face of all that is musically pure and holy. On this day, my ears
pricked up at the sound of an angular bass line setting off at a relentless
pace, accompanied by feedback, jarring guitar riffs and an obtuse and
challenging chord structure. I couldn’t make out the lyrics but the vocals were
delivered at the same break necked speed as the bass. It was all underpinned by
a swirling, fairground like organ.
I was smitten. It was utterly magical.
I slowed my walk to make sure I took the whole track in.
With no phone on me, I couldn’t Shazam it. Other than realising that it was
“greatness” incarnate, I had no idea who or what it was. I felt like Tim Smith
(Cardiacs) and JJ Burnell (The Stranglers) had had a car crash and the
resulting sound was being broadcast to me.
I knew it was on a loop, so over the following days, I kept
returning to the shop floor to hear it again. Over the course of the next week,
I made up more and more spurious reasons to eschew the safety and comfort of my
ivory tower office and step onto the shop floor into the firing line of the
stores demanding staff and pesky customers. All because I was determined to hear this beautiful masterpiece
one more time, to maybe get a lyric that I could google.
Despite my best efforts, I never heard it again.
Plan B was to resume my normal working patterns in my office
but get a copy of the recent store playlist and work through it in my spare time.
A regular complaint of Topshop from its customers was that
they never posted or published the playlists in store making it difficult to ID
a song that was played. And I was in the same boat, except I had an advantage
of Joe or Joanne Public; I could just go and borrow the various discs from the
team responsible for updating/uploading them into the system. So I did.
There were dozens of discs. All with about 20-25 tracks. The
team responsible filed them in an unhelpful pile in a drawer. Few had content
lists, fewer still had dates or anything that may indicate when they had been
issued. What I thought would be a ten minute job seemed to stretch into
forever. I was left with the formidable task of sitting through all the discs
to explore all the music designed to be ignored and find it.
For over a week, I dedicated a couple of hours each night to
the search. My Colliers Wood flat rang out to the sounds of the appalling and
anodyne gush that passes as “Alternative”, these days. I’ve said before. I love
and hate music in equal measure. At times it was a pretty tough task.
Most tracks were skipped after thirty seconds. They clearly
were not what I had heard and they left me cold. Forgettable.
Many tracks that I played through resulted from acts of
involuntary masochism. I would sit open mouthed and stunned as the tepid and
insipid numbed me to the point of oblivion. Coldplay. Kings of Leon. Foo
Fighters. Tragic.
There was some pretty shite stuff being ignored at Topshop
in 2008.
But some demanded my total attention. They seemed beautiful.
Smitten, I became distracted while I wallowed in aural delight, exploring back
catalogues of bands that I had never previously heard. A fair few times, I fell
head over heels in love.
After two weeks, I had reviewed each and every disc
available. And my song wasn’t included on any of them.
Did I imagine it?
I began to question myself. Had I, created an epic
soundtrack in my own mind to take me away from the moment?
It began to convince myself that it was conceivable.
Thinking back to the day I heard it, I was probably on my
way to have a conversation with a shoe concession who had lost a pair of shoes
sometime in the previous 18 months and wanted someone to look at CCTV images to
see who had been near them, or some such nonsense. I would have been walking
through the store with leaden shoes, a leaden head and a heavy heart. The
meeting was probably offset against a background of dealing with one of my
staff who had managed to get another two weeks signed off work by their doctor
because they had a slightly sore throat or felt “an ickle bit funny”.
It was entirely possible that my little, fizzy brain had
given up on the bollocks that was weighing me down and I had created something
that would make me feel momentarily happy… If only I was able to have
transcribed what I had imagined; I could have made some money.
Step forwards to a night out in late 2008 or early 2009.
Somewhere in London.
I meet up with my brother, who produces a small CD sized bag
and offers me a Birthday or Christmas present. I doubt that it was around
either my birthday or Christmas when this happened. My brother and I have a
habit of presenting and receiving gifts early or late. Year’s merge into one.
Unsurprisingly, as usual, the bag contained a CD.
Silvery. Thunderer and Excelsior.
My brother enthused – he had heard them on the Gideon Coe
show on radio 6 – and kept using the words like, “Cardiacs” and “Sparks” and
“Incredible” and “Best Album of the Year” and “Whhhhaaaahhhhhhooooowwwwwwww” all
the while grinning like the type of demented cat only Lewis Carroll could
imagine.
I had already latched onto two key words. Sparks and Cardiacs.
These two words were enough to make me need to hear the
album. But Alex went on to explain that one of the tracks appeared to have
Sparks lyrics being spoken across a solo (still haven’t found that, yet),
another detailed the demise of a class of UK diesel locomotive and a third
listed off a series of London’s Lost Rivers as a near chant during a fade out.
My brother had clearly thought through his sales pitch well.
He sold me three irresistible ideas and concepts. What more could I want from an
album?... See notes, below.
But he missed out a few more surprises…
>> Allusions to ghosts and flying saucers above cemeteries.
>> And a muse about the demise of a ship which was
crewed entirely by mice, bar the ships cat.
But I think that it still took a couple of days to find the
time to give it a listen. I was probably locked in the rota-cokey shift
patterns I wrote about last year.
You can guess the rest?
Track two. Devil in the Detail.
The sound of an
angular bass line setting off at a relentless pace, accompanied by feedback,
jarring guitar riffs and an obtuse and challenging chord structure. I couldn’t
make out the lyrics but the vocals were delivered at the same break necked
speed as the bass. It was all underpinned by a swirling, fairground like organ.
Sitting in my Colliers Wood living room, I was immediately taken
back to that solitary walk across the sales floor at Topshop. Although the
album turned out to sound like the inside of my head, I realised that I hadn’t
imagined it to make myself feel calm and free of daemons. It was real. Very
real. Almost flesh and blood. And it became more beautiful as I listened to it
over and over and over.
It’s late 2015 and I still feel warm each time I hear
the album.
By the time I got to see Silvery live, for the first time at
The 100 Club on July 14th 2011, I’d found a live bootleg from the
Bull & Gate (RIP) and waited at the edge of my seat for the second of three
official album releases – Railway Architecture. Back catalogue entirely
absorbed, I’d read a million words about them and become lost in their old
world videos. I’d had a moment where, back on the shop floor, on the receiving
end of an earnest whinge, for something I or someone else had done or hadn’t
done… who cares? I’d bitten my tongue to the point of bleeding to stop myself
shouting at them:
“Blah Blah Fuckity Blah. Don’t trouble me with
your bollocks! I’m listening to Nishikado!”
And that night in 2011, alongside my brother and about
another twenty fair souls they were as good and great as I imagined that they would
be. Like the best gigs, I was pulled into a vortex where my brain could relax
and swirl around and around like something out of The Wizard of Oz leaving me
giddy and wound up like a clock-work toy by the end. But – for all my passion
for the moment - I sensed that James Orman wasn’t feeling it that night. He
seemed disengaged and remote… the rest of the band had to persuade him to play
“You Give A Little Love”.
But it mattered not, to me. I was lost. But found.
Now, I’m not going to encourage you to visit Topshop. I
doubt they play Silvery anymore.
And I’m not going to say that you should all go out and buy
everything that Silvery have ever released. That would be senseless.
But, I will say that, if you don’t go out and buy everything
that they have ever released, I consider you an idiot.
For Reference:
NOTES
I suppose that the album could include Sarah Nixey making a fake BBC public announcement regarding an imminent nuclear threat to London. I would have to wait until 2015 to have that appear on an album, thanks to Luke Haines.